Sky Sports takes ChyronHego’s Player Tracking graphics to air

The UK sports channel enhances its live soccer coverage with advanced virtual graphics and football analysis tools.September 16, 2013

Sky Sports UK is to deliver a powerful graphics solution to enhance its live football coverage using a combination of TRACAB Player Tracking data complemented by ChyronHego’s advanced virtual graphics and football analysis tools. Together, they create a winning solution that enables graphics to be tagged to any player on the pitch and follow them across the field of play.

“ChyronHego’s Player Tracking graphics present many new possibilities for broadcasters such as Sky Sports,” said Johan Apel, President and COO at ChyronHego. “Single players or formations of players can immediately be highlighted and identified during a live match, and the graphic then automatically follows each player as they move in 3D space. This allows for the quick and easy creation of complex analysis sequences that would typically be reserved for post-match highlight shows and would require time consuming key framing and preparation work.”

This solution was both prototyped and enhanced by ChyronHego in partnership with Sky Sports on several games during the last season of the Premier League, with much of the output content making it live to air. At the start of the current Premier League season, Sky Sports and ChyronHego have continued to work together to enhance the solution even further. On the back of these successful productions with Sky Sports in the UK, Sky Germany has also begun to deploy the same solution across its domestic Bundesliga coverage to take advantage of the player tracking data being provided and to bring a new dimension to their domestic broadcast.